Chain Reaction

by Nicholas Guild

  It just didn’t make any sense to assume anything except that he had been more or less on the level. Probably at the last minute he just lost his nerve.

  Except that he had called twice—once in the afternoon and then again this morning. He had had plenty of time to suffer through the terrors of indecision, and then he had picked up the phone and set up a meeting. There wasn’t any rule that said he couldn’t subsequently chicken out—it wouldn’t exactly have been a unique instance—but somehow Havens had trouble getting himself to believe it. Stafford had sounded so eager, as if the really scary thing was to stay out on the loose with von Niehauser.

  That was what Havens was really looking forward to—meeting Joachim von Niehauser. Guys like Stafford were ten to the penny, but von Niehauser sounded like rather an exotic specimen. After all, how often in this business did you get to collar a baron?

  It was a fine, brisk weekday afternoon. The lunch hour was over, and in this largely residential neighborhood everyone was either back at work or home taking care of the laundry. The sidewalks weren’t particularly crowded; you didn’t have to dodge around people’s shoulders as you strolled along, wondering what to do next about a couple of Nazi spies that were loose in the country. It was almost relaxing.

  As he crossed the intersection at Seventy-seventh Street, a man came around the corner from the Park Avenue side, brushed past him, and took the stairs down the entrance to the subway. For a moment their eyes met, as sometimes happens with people you pass on the street, and then he was gone. He was a handsome man in a dark, otherworldly sort of way, but probably, Havens thought to himself, the only reason he had noticed him was that he happened not to be wearing a hat. Perhaps he didn’t mind the cold—somehow he rather looked the type who wouldn’t. And, of course, he had the sort of face that made you ask yourself where you had seen him before.

  Havens had almost forgotten him, and was nearly halfway up the block, before he remembered. And then it struck him with such force that for those brief few seconds the breath seemed to have gone out from beneath his ribs.

  “Like a movie star,” the waitress had said. “The whole number—tall, dark, and handsome. He reminded me a little of Tyrone Power. . .”

  He spun around so fast that he almost tripped and fell over his own feet, and an elderly woman with a shopping basket full of oranges—probably he would carry the memory of the expression on her face with him to the Last Judgment—had to dodge out of the way as he ran to the subway entrance, jumping down the stairs four at a time.

  “My God, my God, my God,” he kept repeating, whether out loud or simply in his mind he had no idea, “let him still be there. Let the bastard still be there.”

  He thought he could hear the roar of a train—was it on this side, or the other? Or maybe it was the express on the lower level—and he hit the platform at a dead run. People were pushing past him, turning back to stare.

  Maybe the roar was merely the sound of the blood pumping in his ears. Maybe there was still time.

  But there was no time. From the barricade he could see the back of the last car pulling away. He was too late.

  He clambered over the turnstile, hoping against hope that maybe, for some reason, von Niehauser might have missed this one, might have gone to the men’s room, might still be out there, waiting for the next train. Panting for breath, Havens glanced around him, but the crowd was all moving toward the exits. There was no one waiting—no one who mattered. Strike three.

  “Hey, buddy, you can’t do that.” He felt a hand on his shoulder, and turned around to find himself in the custody of one of the station guards.

  What was the half-wit talking about?

  “You wanna ride, you gotta pay a nickel just like everybody else. Come on.”

  The guard started to lead him back to the barricade, but Havens wasn’t going anywhere.

  “Can you stop that train?”

  The guard, who had reddish hair and huge freckles but otherwise seemed to be all arms and shoulders, peered at him out of tiny, pale blue eyes that registered nothing except bewilderment.

  “Stop it—man, why should you want me to stop it? Keep your shirt on. There’ll be another one along in a couple o’ minutes.”

  Havens hardly knew what to do, until he remembered that he was a cop. He was a federal agent in pursuit of a criminal. He fished around in his pocket until he found his badge case, flipped it open, and held it up in front of him like a priest with a cross.

  The guard stared at it and then, as if as an afterthought, lifted his hand away from Havens’ arm.

  “One more time—can you stop that train?”

  “Stop it,” the guard repeated, this time with a kind of unfocused anguish, as if he personally might be held responsible. “Man, by now they’re already most of the way down to Fifty­ninth Street. How the hell am I supposed to stop it?”

  “Have you got a phone?”

  “Sure I got a phone. In the booth.”

  It was useless. What was he supposed to say, that Joachim von Niehauser, wanted for espionage and murder, had been last seen in the vicinity of the Lexington Avenue subway line? But he had to try. There wasn’t anything left to do except to try.

  “Cover the railway and bus stations—I don’t care how many men it takes. And I think we’d better bring New York’s Finest in on this. If he gets out of Manhattan, then we might as well forget it because we’ll never get near him again.”

  As he hung up the phone, he wondered if the subway platform at Seventy-seventh Street wasn’t as close as anyone was ever going to get to von Niehauser, ever again. Had the man realized he was being hunted? Was that what that split second of recognition had meant?

  Havens took the composite sketch out of his inside coat pocket and spread it out on the table inside the token booth to look at it. The expression on von Niehauser’s face seemed by its very blandness to mock him.

  But the artist had done a good job—the baron might have sat to have his portrait painted.

  I’ll meet you at Charlie’s. I have breakfast there a lot, so I know the layout.

  Von Niehauser comes down Seventy-seventh Street from Park to catch the subway, and Stafford is a regular at a greasy spoon nearby. This had to be their home turf—not very many other conclusions were possible.

  So everything might not be lost after all. Havens smiled at the printed sketch that had grown creased and grubby with constant handling; it was as if the issue between himself and the calm, refined face had become somehow intensely personal.

  At the corner of Seventy-seventh and Park he took the green light as an omen and started uptown. He would do five blocks up Park and then cross over and do ten down the other side of the avenue. Then he would double back and, if he came up dry, start in on the side streets. It was bound to take hours, but it was better than sitting around on his hands back at the office and—who could tell?—his two spies might not have fled their nest for good and all. If he found the place, it would certainly be worth putting under guard. Besides, he might even stumble on a few clues—the odd, scribbled-over piece of notepaper perhaps, or the ever popular coded set of instructions hidden in a tube of toothpaste. After all, he didn’t know the man; von Niehauser might be that melodramatic, or that careless.

  . . . . .

  But it didn’t take hours—only about twenty-five minutes. The custodian at 947 Park Avenue recognized “Mr. Wemberley” as soon as he saw the sketch.

  “Sure. He and the other gentleman share number seven, quiet as mice. They rob a bank or somethin’?”

  Havens had had to track him down to his little utility room in the basement, where he was sitting in his undershirt, hunched over a plate of brown lumpy paste that could have been absolutely anything. He blinked inquisitively, shrugging his hairy shoulders as if to testify to his harmlessness. Havens shook his head.

  “I just want to talk to him—him or his friend. Why don’t you just loan me your key.”

  The badge once again worked its magic,
and Havens got the key. The custodian wanted to come along, “just to make sure that everything’s all right”—was he just curious, or did he think there was a chance Havens might walk off with the spoons?—but Havens told him in his best and most official sounding policeman’s voice to stay down in the basement and keep out of trouble.

  He took the stairs up, on the theory that elevators were noisier, and inserted the key in the front door lock as silently as he could. The door swung open, and Havens rolled into the living room in the manner he had learned at Quantico and came to rest behind one end of a rather large sofa, his revolver pointing menacingly at the fireplace. No one shot at him.

  Nothing moved. There was no sign that anyone was even living there. The furniture had the slightly worn look that one associates with hired rooms, and the air was stale. The place was like a burial vault. Finally, feeling a little foolish, Havens got up and ventured into the next room.

  It was a kitchen, and nobody was hiding in the refrigerator. If anybody was home, he was awfully good at holding his breath. Still, something wasn’t quite right. You could almost smell it.

  At the end of the short corridor there were three doors. Havens tried the one on the right-hand side and discovered it was a bedroom—probably that was the arrangement, two bedrooms with a bathroom in between.

  He would have bet any money that von Niehauser slept in here. Somehow he had never been able to think of von Niehauser as anything except a soldier and this was a soldier’s room, for all that there wasn’t anywhere in sight an item as personal as an open magazine. The bed was covered with a single blanket, and the sheets had been drawn as tight as drum skin. There was one chair, made of wood, without so much as a cushion, as though the man had lost the habit of personal comfort. Havens closed the door respectfully.

  He found Stafford in the bathroom, hanging by his necktie from the showerhead. His eyes had almost started out of their sockets and his hands looked swollen. He seemed so surprised.

  There was a reddish bruise on his throat, just half an inch below where the necktie was digging into the flesh. Havens took him lightly by the wrist and found that rigor mortis had already begun to set in. At the merest touch the corpse began turning slowly in an arc from right to left, his shoes tapping against the sides of the bathtub.

  “Well, Harry,” he murmured to his unhearing companion, who seemed to be surveying the room as slowly he twisted at the end of his necktie, “it looks like the baron won’t be coming back after all.”

  7

  For the rest of the afternoon and evening von Niehauser’s apartment was full of New York City homicide detectives, so Havens retired to the kitchen where, for some reason, nobody bothered to come looking for evidence. There was a telephone in the kitchen and, given that, he could keep track of his people just as well there as he could have downtown at Bureau headquarters and, in any case, the city police carried the major responsibility for the dragnet—they had the manpower and it was their sandlot. Besides, Havens wanted to stick around for a word with the coroner.

  “No, you idiot, don’t cut him down. Get up there and untie the fucking thing. And get him out of these clothes first—we’ll want to do a fiber screening. Gently, you moron.”

  Watching Harry Stafford make his slow way down from the showerhead wasn’t a terribly appetizing business. When they got him out of his trousers you could see that his legs were all covered with postmortem bruises, and when they had finally lowered him into the bathtub, and loosened the necktie by which he’d been hanging, he started to belch. It was just trapped gas escaping from his stomach, but he sounded like he was snoring. One of the detectives found it so unnerving that he had to step out of the room.

  The coroner was a small, precise man with a pencil line mustache, thin brown hair plastered carefully across his skull, and the eyes of a bird of prey. The cuffs of his white shirt were carefully turned back as he examined the corpse, which by then was as rigid as a brick.

  “I’d say he’s been dead about three hours,” he said, handing a thermometer back to his harassed assistant. “When did you say you found him?” He turned around to look at Havens, who was crouched just behind his right shoulder.

  “About ten minutes after three.”

  “Then you must have arrived not more than forty minutes to an hour after the murder.” The coroner smiled faintly, as if the fact represented some sort of personal triumph. “That wasn’t rigor mortis you noted; that was cadaveric spasm. The stiffening comes at the moment of death, usually because the victim is badly frightened. He must have been petrified of whoever killed him.”

  “Then you’re ruling out a suicide?”

  “Oh yes—look at that.” He pointed to the bruise directly over Stafford’s windpipe. It looked like someone had painted it on. “That was what did the damage. See the difference in color from the marks left by the necktie? He didn’t hang himself. He was already dead.”

  “That checks.” The voice came from the bathroom doorway, which was entirely filled with a detective lieutenant named Phelan whom Havens remembered from before the war. “We found a patch of blood about the size of your hand in one of the bedrooms. The killer must have dragged him in here afterward—what did you say his name was, Havens?”

  “Von Niehauser. Joachim von Niehauser. He killed a kid up in Maine ten days ago.”

  “The same way?” Phelan’s heavy black eyebrows raised slightly, but otherwise the expression on his meaty face remained unchanged. He was interested, but only professionally. Havens nodded.

  “Broke his larynx. Apparently Herr von Niehauser knows what he’s doing.”

  “So it would seem.”

  A few minutes later Harry Stafford was inside a canvas bag and on his way to the icebox at the city morgue. With its guest of honor gone, the party began to lose some of its sparkle. Except for the few technicians, who were dusting everything in sight for fingerprints and worked as silently as moles, there was almost no one left in the apartment except Havens and Lieutenant Phelan.

  “You know, I hate them when they’re like this,” Phelan said, sitting down rather heavily on one of the kitchen chairs. “We’ve got our one and only suspect, and if he’s really a spy like you say the city won’t even have the expense of trying him. There’s nothing left to do except to catch the son of a bitch. It’s too easy—it’s like something you get out of a can.”

  He scowled, and his forehead crinkled into heavy folds. He was leaning against the kitchen table and the fingers of one huge hand were curled over the edge. The simplicity of the case seemed to depress him horribly.

  “What I can’t understand is why he even bothered to try making it look like a suicide. What did the stupid bastard think it was going to buy him?”

  “A little time, maybe. Most likely it would have if I hadn’t happened to spot him ducking into that subway entrance.” Havens smiled, trying hard to sound like the detached observer—it was odd, however, how he felt a proprietary interest in von Niehauser’s good name.

  “And I think you’ll find that he turns out to be anything but stupid. He may be a bastard, but he’s a clever one. It made good sense to string Stafford up like that. If the body had been discovered in the normal course of things, you might have missed the broken larynx until autopsy and been stuck with the presumption of suicide for another couple of days. And how much more of a head start do you think he would have needed?”

  “Well, he didn’t get much, did he. Don’t worry your head about it; we’ll have him down in the Tombs before the weekend.”

  “I admire your confidence.”

  “We’ll catch him.” Phelan looked up, his eyes reflecting the unblemished certainty of a man stating the unassailably true. “Why shouldn’t we catch him? He’s a man on his own, without a soul who would lift a finger for him, and we’ve got men turning this town on its ear. The bus and train stations are being watched, even the subways out to Long Island and up to the Bronx. The tollbooths on the bridges and tunnels have been reinforc
ed. Manhattan is an island—where can he go?”

  . . . . .

  Underground—underground. Von Niehauser rode the subways, more or less at random, trying never to stay too long in one station, until he was sure it would be dark outside. When he ventured back to the surface he found himself in Greenwich Village. It was a clear, cold night, and music seemed to be coming from every doorway. For some reason it reminded him of his student days in Göttingen.

  There were crowds on the sidewalks; their presence was oddly and unreasonably consoling, as if no force on earth would think to take him from the midst of these sympathetically indifferent people. He walked along the southern edge of Washington Square, a stranger among strangers.

  He stopped for a moment a few blocks away, at the entrance to what seemed to be a public recreation area of some kind, although it was surrounded by a high chain-link fence and the surface was covered with asphalt, making it look more like the yard of a concentration camp. Several boys were playing a game which involved throwing a large ball through a hoop suspended three or four feet over their heads from a pole. Whoever had the ball kept bouncing it against the ground as he ran around, trying to approach the hoop for a throw, and the others all seemed bent on taking it away from him, although none of them ever touched him. It was a curious game—he had seen it only once before, at the Olympics in Berlin. He couldn’t remember the name; he could only assume it was something indigenous to the country.

  Two old men were seated on a wooden bench just outside the fence. They appeared to be arguing, although they were speaking in a language von Niehauser couldn’t remember ever having heard before so it was impossible to be sure. One of them was gesturing with a heavy cane he held very near the crook in his clenched left hand—there was nothing threatening in it; the cane was merely for emphasis.